Thomas Fiffer explains the exceptional draw and destructive impact of partners who are determined to change you.
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Here’s the thing about dysfunctional partners:
They possess many qualities associated with success, qualities which may have drawn you to them.
They’re driven.
They’re determined.
They’re deeply committed.
And they’re ruthless about realizing their vision.
They also seem singularly obsessed with “loving” you.
But they’re destined to fail miserably.
Because their desired outcome is rarely, if ever, a healthy, mutually respectful relationship, or even their own personal growth or accomplishment.
No, it’s not.
And it’s not your growth and betterment—though they may pretend it is.
It’s your behavioral change.
That’s right.
Dysfunctional partners fight tooth, nail, and even nuke to change you.
To bend and twist you to their vision of who you need to be to meet their needs.
Dysfunctional partners find it excruciating to change themselves—because changing themselves means acknowledging their dysfunction instead of deflecting it onto you.
Changing themselves means facing the hurt they continue to cause instead of blaming you for it.
Changing themselves means humbly entering a context of healing, instead of demanding that you heal them.
Changing themselves means constantly monitoring their unhealthy habits and working to make conscious change, instead of saying “I can’t help it.”
And changing themselves means touching the broken place inside themselves, surrendering that place to God, giving over the pain, and allowing Him to re-fracture and reset the bone.
Changing themselves is hard.
And why bother, really, when finding someone else to change is—by the cold calculus of effort expended—so much easier.
So they find partners whose resistance to change, for whatever reasons, is compromised.
And they go to work.
Relentlessly.
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When you respect and honor your partner, you help your partner stand taller and straighter.
When you try to change your partner, you cause your partner to become stooped and crooked, under the awful weight of the assault.
This is not the delicious weight you feel when you’re with someone committed to helping you grow into your best self.
This is the dead weight of depravity, a word whose rotten roots lie in the Latin pravus, or crooked.
And here’s how the dysfunctional dynamic sets in and eventually rots out the relationship.
The more you resist the pressure to change; the more you stand up for yourself, your values, your beliefs; the more you behave in healthy ways; the more you become an obstacle to your dysfunctional partner’s goal, and the more that person fills with contempt, floods with hatred, and wants to destroy you.
Your dysfunctional partner would rather set you on fire and dance around your ashes than learn to quench the impetuous impulses and burning needs that rage inside them.
They only hold these at bay when they want something from you, when another need needs to be met.
If your dysfunctional partner can’t change you, he wants to obliterate you, to nuke you out of existence.
The only way you can survive is to be someone other than yourself.
Change—or die.
And so the trap is set.
The only escape is leaving.
Leaving both the dynamic and the dysfunctional partner behind.
Honoring yourself, respecting your own need for a constructive, supportive relationship, and moving on.
Leaving can be especially hard if you have sunk years into the relationship, expended unending effort trying to heal you partner, and adapted yourself to functioning around the dysfunction.
You may see yourself as having become someone else and ask yourself, who am I now?
How do I get back to me?
But you are still you.
You have always been you.
And you have a life ahead of you.
A bright, fulfilling, happy life.
Joy awaits.
Actual joy.
The joy that you deserve.
So step away.
My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. – Exodus 33:14
Step away—and seize the joy.
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Originally published on Tom Aplomb and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
Agree. So, is change just another word for control?